As someone who owns a weathered copy of Hackers and Painters and routinely says things like “a rare miss from pg”, I think this is a big miss from pg.
And the real shame is that he gets so close: he talks about discovery, about the intersection of science and technology and the broader world, he identifies the importance of doing things to learn enough to write about them, and most importantly: having an outrageous question with a real and alarming insight lurking around the corner as an answer and thereby avoids vaporous rhapsodizing.
So I’ll ask an outrageous question about which pg has both deep insight and over a decade of lived experience to ground an answer on: is YC still a good thing? I’ll ask a few corollary questions to illustrate.
He talks about the kinds of tests you hack to get ahead in some vague elsewhere: is getting ahead in YC, or the Valley, or the technology business still about merit and capability and being relentlessly resourceful rather than optics, connections, and flexibility? Is it about garages with Ethernet cables snaking everywhere more or less than knowing one’s way around the Rosewood Sand Hill?
His first citation as a reviewer is Sam Altman: is @sama still his pick for most capable founder and best person to guide the sprawling empire that YC sits at the heart of?
I don’t find any of those things obvious, and I think a candid essay about a set of very timely questions would be the most important essay he’d ever written.
Sam went through the garage startup stage in 2005-2007, and again in 2015-2017 with OpenAI. He was good at it -- I saw both firsthand. At OpenAI he was scrounging GPUs when that's what we needed most, and wangled a prototype DGX-1 long before you could buy one. More importantly, he convinced people to leave multi-million dollar salaries at Google & DeepMind for a tiny startup no one had heard of. Now OpenAI needs to build a trillion dollars of infrastructure and lobby governments for favorable regulation, so he's doing whatever that involves. It wouldn't make sense for him to be running Ethernet cables today.
YC's public content focuses on early-stage startups. Should it have more on late-stage startups? Maybe, but it doesn't seem as impactful. The reason to produce public content is that it can scale to reach more people than the partners can talk to one-on-one. There are fewer late-stage startups, so the scaling problem hasn't hit yet. YC follows its own advice of doing things in ways that don't scale until scaling becomes necessary.
One set of outrageous if solicited questions to a living legend seems enough for one day, and I'm very aware of the amount of non-public, first-hand knowledge I'm addressing here, so please take this in the highly respectful spirit in which it is intended from someone who recognizes that their entire career and adult life have been shaped by your and pg's achievements.
I do not find it at all obvious that either a trillion dollars in private investment or aggressive lobbying around regulation favorable to a particular for-profit entity are necessary or even possible paths to outcomes that are globally good for humanity or locally good for the community of people who spend time in threads like these.
I don't think that I'm part of a small minority in finding those means very dubious ways to accomplish things, the ends to which those means are being put of questionable public-mindedness, or the secrecy and apparent subterfuge with which this to all external appearances is being done acceptable ways to wield vast power.
I don't know if you'd make this argument, but others have when arguing for the same outcomes, so if I'm addressing them and not you please excuse me: we have institutions with a mandate from the public to deploy wartime budgets on Manhattan Project-scale undertakings attended by extreme risk. This cannot be ethically, morally, or legally delegated to unelected and unappointed individuals or private for-profit institutions via what was once called corruption.
Clearly I speak only for myself, but many others with far better credentials are saying similar things, in many cases much more stridently.
While comparing ordinary human activity to language modeling is perhaps the greatest intellectual cliche of 2024, what PG describes in the essay-writing process itself essentially boils down to beam search. Autocomplete, find wrongness, backtrack, predict more consistent series of next tokens. The fact that only one of those options is actually reflected on the screen doesn't change the fact that the writer is probability-weighting continuations in their head.
I remember running across a tweet that said, in essence, you always have access to your own optimal policy if you simply ask. A similar technique might be the key to wresting good ideas from an ambiguous starting point: "What would be the most consistent answer to the original question, given what I've learned and written so far?"
Maybe that's the process PG describes themselves, but I think that the amount of different "processes" or "human equivalent to LLM decoding/sampling techniques" used by humans is likely very large - far larger than the number of techniques available to LLMs today.
Today within LLMs, there typicality sampling, contrastive search, top-p/top-k (nucleus sampling), and a whole massive amount of other more obscure techniques which didn't make it into huggingfaces model.generate() function.
I believe that the ontological configuration of humans has wide variety. As such, I believe that humans go through a diverse and vibrant amount of different writing processes - and often radically different processes can still result in excellent works!
Specifically, beam search is really only good at dealing with sequence-sequence tasks, i.e. summarization or translation. It's also horribly, horribly inefficient in the worst case scenarios. That said, it's also the only good way we know of for enforcing sequence level constraints (i.e. like this https://huggingface.co/blog/constrained-beam-search)
"It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors."
Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way.
You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up against: Baldwin, Didion, Oliver Sacks; it's easier to come up with examples of great essays that don't set out to develop surprising new ideas, and that probably didn't start out with a mischievous look in the author's eyes.
I'm not saying this isn't good advice for developing great essays, just that it's advice that narrows the solution space a bit much.
This wouldn't be a classic Paul Graham essay without his two great hallmarks -- many passages of provocative valuable insights -- paired with periodic, bewildering attempts to sabotage his own argument.
I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.
1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.
2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.
70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed
1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.
1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.
We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."
Excellent point on "Death of a pig" by E.B White. It's the perfect example of a timeless essay, without a "big scientific idea".
For others unaware of it, that essay was written in 1948[1], go read it in full. It starts like this:
"I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting."
Would also like to mention that the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White is an all-time great book on non-fiction writing. It was required for my Newspaper Fundamentals class in college and I've used it so much since that the creases are wearing thin.
There's another fantastic book—On Writing Well—that is a recurring read for me. An aside—I was in one of the early programing bootcamps, The Starter League. My class was held in 37signals office. Jason Fried and some of the other 37signals designers were in this class with me. One day Jason stood up and answered a few questions. One of the other students asked him about books. He walked over to a closet and opened the door. There were hundreds of copies of On Writing Well. That's the book he'd gift to people.
That always struck me as interesting. Especially since he'd written (or co-authored) several books at that point.
I want to be careful not to pummel a straw man, because it's sort of clear that Graham doesn't believe the Best essay must come from an exploration of science or of exciting new ideas (though most of the advice he gives is for that kind of essay). If I have a concern, I think it's about the chemistry his writing has with this community, how threads here will bleach it down to a game of prog-rock writing, trying to somehow outdo Darwin.
"Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones."
I amusingly reject a ton of the lead in. Though, my rejection starts with the idea that there is a conceivable total ordering of essays. Heck, for that matter, I question if there is even a stable ordering of essays in a topic. Seems that what helps make an essay good for today may not be what lets it be a good essay for tomorrow.
And that isn't even getting into things like "must tell you something you didn't know." By that, I can never find an essay that I've read before to be great? Or to learn from one I have already read before, but from a different perspective?
Will be fun to read more of what others hear in this essay. I suspect I should give more credence to the idea of the best essay for today. And each day can be another search for today's winning entry.
“While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”
Much of the restricted depth of this nature is a consequence of deliberate obfuscation or neglect by the people who are involved in the doing, such as trade secrets, or simply choosing not to write about or share the actual things that impact their craft.
You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
How can you claim your knowledge of the field is actually deep, if you’ve never even done anything with it? Knowledge without application is nothing, imo.
True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.
>You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough.
In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.
I misread that for a second as "while breath comes from reading and talking and seeing, death comes from doing" which I thought would be a great line from a Zorro film, even if not that sensible.
I think the concept of a best essay is somewhat illogical, but exploring the idea like this makes an interesting post.
After all, the term "essay" was invented/popularized by Montaigne in a book of his writing called "Essays" - and "essay" is French for "to try." So from that context, essays shouldn't be concerned with finding answers or be the "best" but to make discoveries in the process of trying.
From that same Wiki definition I notice that "In English, essay first
meant a trial or an attempt.
That implies an iteration on some seed, or maybe just the intent to
grow and iterate on the initial essay.
Personally I find that true. Most of my "essays" I keep for myself, or
sometimes share just with close friends who I trust to bounce ideas
off as they mature.
Later they become collections of essays in a folder, and I might join
the dots between them to perhaps see the potential for something of a
book, or a new essay that synthesises them.
So I think calling something an "essay" grants the author one special
privilege; the right to revise and "re-attempt" the same piece without
moral judgement.
That's problematic in the Internet age, where the provenance of a
document is judged by dates, by diffs to archived versions etc. It
wouldn't seem right to actually change the contents at the same URL.
Nor would it seem right to insist on tracking edits, because a writer
always has the right to forget and disown old and weak ideas they've
moved beyond.
So I think essayists have our permission to keep approaching the same
idea over and over. The way composers would sometimes write ten
different versions of the same piece.
What makes a "best" essay then is its improvement with respect to the
author's previous attempts.
All we can ask is, "Is this Mr Graham's best essay so far?"
In Spanish we have ensayo = attempt or try, frequently is used to refer to attempts before the real show or performance (in a music festival, a theater, ..). Also ensayo is just equivalent to what Montaigned introduced when referred to a text composition.
That site doesn't seem great, but according to Wiktionary "assay" is a doublet of "essay", i.e. the origin is the same but they were borrowed into English via two different sources.
"Assay" came via Norman, "essay" came via French.
There are lots of other examples like this where one word came from Norman and the other from French, e.g. warden + guardian, warranty + guarantee
Good comment. It surprised me that a definition of essay wasn't sought before asking questions about the supposed best. But that tentative approach actually struck the essence in an interestingly performative manner.
> I think the concept of a best essay is somewhat illogical, but exploring the idea like this makes an interesting post.
pg does specifically address this objection btw:
> I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.
> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.
Preemptive dismissal of any criticism of the idea of a best essay is stupid. In particular, even though I buy the "possibility of one essay being better than another", the criteria for ordering will be necessarily subjective.
As someone who has read many essays in the European tradition (Montaigne, Sartre, etc.), I cannot bring myself to see the essays by E. B. White, for example, to be superior in any sense. Yet, I know that White's essays are held in high-regard in this part of the world. This points to the fact that there is no universal ordering function for essays, which mostly invalidates Graham's argument above.
What a strange essay! To try to find out what makes a good (sorry "THE BEST") essay without any reference to any of the great essays that have actually been written? It feels a bit like the head of a university's English department setting out to discover "the best computer program" but without talking to or refering to the work of any of the thousands of people who've made it their life to study and practice the craft.
> For example, Darwin first described the idea of natural selection in an essay written in 1844. [1] Talk about an important topic you could tell people something surprising about. If that's the test of a great essay, this was surely the best one written in 1844.
I think he's speaking broadly about what counts as an essay, and does have at least one example in there to illustrate his point. He's also an esteemed essay writer, and I think it's fair for him to talk about what he values in an essay without needing to justify any of it by saying "and also, this person that some people respect did it like that"
Most of the time so, this approach leads to very deep discoveries of the kind other people learned in the first days of a 101 lesson studying said subject, at university or during some formal training of trade or craft.
IMHO, the best [individual] essay contains single paragraph/sentenced trasmissions that connect [or overhelm] the reader with impact at [the right] times.
At the same time, to strengthen the practice, make a statement and then follow with a question. Make the impact, leave the reader with a question back to it. It's two sentences, paragraph break.
Those are the best essays.
He practiced this technique many times in this article. But is this the format of best essays [of the Internet]?
Readit News
And the real shame is that he gets so close: he talks about discovery, about the intersection of science and technology and the broader world, he identifies the importance of doing things to learn enough to write about them, and most importantly: having an outrageous question with a real and alarming insight lurking around the corner as an answer and thereby avoids vaporous rhapsodizing.
So I’ll ask an outrageous question about which pg has both deep insight and over a decade of lived experience to ground an answer on: is YC still a good thing? I’ll ask a few corollary questions to illustrate.
He talks about the kinds of tests you hack to get ahead in some vague elsewhere: is getting ahead in YC, or the Valley, or the technology business still about merit and capability and being relentlessly resourceful rather than optics, connections, and flexibility? Is it about garages with Ethernet cables snaking everywhere more or less than knowing one’s way around the Rosewood Sand Hill?
His first citation as a reviewer is Sam Altman: is @sama still his pick for most capable founder and best person to guide the sprawling empire that YC sits at the heart of?
I don’t find any of those things obvious, and I think a candid essay about a set of very timely questions would be the most important essay he’d ever written.
YC's public content focuses on early-stage startups. Should it have more on late-stage startups? Maybe, but it doesn't seem as impactful. The reason to produce public content is that it can scale to reach more people than the partners can talk to one-on-one. There are fewer late-stage startups, so the scaling problem hasn't hit yet. YC follows its own advice of doing things in ways that don't scale until scaling becomes necessary.
I do not find it at all obvious that either a trillion dollars in private investment or aggressive lobbying around regulation favorable to a particular for-profit entity are necessary or even possible paths to outcomes that are globally good for humanity or locally good for the community of people who spend time in threads like these.
I don't think that I'm part of a small minority in finding those means very dubious ways to accomplish things, the ends to which those means are being put of questionable public-mindedness, or the secrecy and apparent subterfuge with which this to all external appearances is being done acceptable ways to wield vast power.
I don't know if you'd make this argument, but others have when arguing for the same outcomes, so if I'm addressing them and not you please excuse me: we have institutions with a mandate from the public to deploy wartime budgets on Manhattan Project-scale undertakings attended by extreme risk. This cannot be ethically, morally, or legally delegated to unelected and unappointed individuals or private for-profit institutions via what was once called corruption.
Clearly I speak only for myself, but many others with far better credentials are saying similar things, in many cases much more stridently.
Of course one can only guess what the message for him might be.
I remember running across a tweet that said, in essence, you always have access to your own optimal policy if you simply ask. A similar technique might be the key to wresting good ideas from an ambiguous starting point: "What would be the most consistent answer to the original question, given what I've learned and written so far?"
Today within LLMs, there typicality sampling, contrastive search, top-p/top-k (nucleus sampling), and a whole massive amount of other more obscure techniques which didn't make it into huggingfaces model.generate() function.
I believe that the ontological configuration of humans has wide variety. As such, I believe that humans go through a diverse and vibrant amount of different writing processes - and often radically different processes can still result in excellent works!
Specifically, beam search is really only good at dealing with sequence-sequence tasks, i.e. summarization or translation. It's also horribly, horribly inefficient in the worst case scenarios. That said, it's also the only good way we know of for enforcing sequence level constraints (i.e. like this https://huggingface.co/blog/constrained-beam-search)
Why not? "Death of a Pig" didn't convey any new scientific ideas, and might not even have been surprising in any kind of intellectual way.
You could title this piece "Great Essays" and it would be entirely defensible. But Graham gave himself a higher goal here, and I don't think he's really presented a recipe for writing the Best essay. Look what he's up against: Baldwin, Didion, Oliver Sacks; it's easier to come up with examples of great essays that don't set out to develop surprising new ideas, and that probably didn't start out with a mischievous look in the author's eyes.
I'm not saying this isn't good advice for developing great essays, just that it's advice that narrows the solution space a bit much.
I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.
1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.
2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.
70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed
1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.
1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.
We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."
For others unaware of it, that essay was written in 1948[1], go read it in full. It starts like this:
"I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240227003736/https://www.theat...
There's another fantastic book—On Writing Well—that is a recurring read for me. An aside—I was in one of the early programing bootcamps, The Starter League. My class was held in 37signals office. Jason Fried and some of the other 37signals designers were in this class with me. One day Jason stood up and answered a few questions. One of the other students asked him about books. He walked over to a closet and opened the door. There were hundreds of copies of On Writing Well. That's the book he'd gift to people.
That always struck me as interesting. Especially since he'd written (or co-authored) several books at that point.
"Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones."
Sounds like you have a challenge in front of you.
And that isn't even getting into things like "must tell you something you didn't know." By that, I can never find an essay that I've read before to be great? Or to learn from one I have already read before, but from a different perspective?
Will be fun to read more of what others hear in this essay. I suspect I should give more credence to the idea of the best essay for today. And each day can be another search for today's winning entry.
“While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”
You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.
After all, the term "essay" was invented/popularized by Montaigne in a book of his writing called "Essays" - and "essay" is French for "to try." So from that context, essays shouldn't be concerned with finding answers or be the "best" but to make discoveries in the process of trying.
From that same Wiki definition I notice that "In English, essay first meant a trial or an attempt.
That implies an iteration on some seed, or maybe just the intent to grow and iterate on the initial essay.
Personally I find that true. Most of my "essays" I keep for myself, or sometimes share just with close friends who I trust to bounce ideas off as they mature.
Later they become collections of essays in a folder, and I might join the dots between them to perhaps see the potential for something of a book, or a new essay that synthesises them.
So I think calling something an "essay" grants the author one special privilege; the right to revise and "re-attempt" the same piece without moral judgement.
That's problematic in the Internet age, where the provenance of a document is judged by dates, by diffs to archived versions etc. It wouldn't seem right to actually change the contents at the same URL.
Nor would it seem right to insist on tracking edits, because a writer always has the right to forget and disown old and weak ideas they've moved beyond.
So I think essayists have our permission to keep approaching the same idea over and over. The way composers would sometimes write ten different versions of the same piece.
What makes a "best" essay then is its improvement with respect to the author's previous attempts.
All we can ask is, "Is this Mr Graham's best essay so far?"
Which looks to be where the English word assay comes from too: https://www.etymonline.com/word/assay
"Assay" came via Norman, "essay" came via French.
There are lots of other examples like this where one word came from Norman and the other from French, e.g. warden + guardian, warranty + guarantee
To "assay" is to engage in an "investigative (analytic) procedure" upon some thing [0].
To "essay" (je vais essayer) is an attempt to achieve a specific thing.
The former seems more like an exploration without initial expectations, like a fact finding, focus group, or initial prototype.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assay
Deleted Comment
pg does specifically address this objection btw:
> I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.
This is false unless you further assume that "better than" is a total order.
Preemptive dismissal of any criticism of the idea of a best essay is stupid. In particular, even though I buy the "possibility of one essay being better than another", the criteria for ordering will be necessarily subjective.
As someone who has read many essays in the European tradition (Montaigne, Sartre, etc.), I cannot bring myself to see the essays by E. B. White, for example, to be superior in any sense. Yet, I know that White's essays are held in high-regard in this part of the world. This points to the fact that there is no universal ordering function for essays, which mostly invalidates Graham's argument above.
Deleted Comment
I think he's speaking broadly about what counts as an essay, and does have at least one example in there to illustrate his point. He's also an esteemed essay writer, and I think it's fair for him to talk about what he values in an essay without needing to justify any of it by saying "and also, this person that some people respect did it like that"
At the same time, to strengthen the practice, make a statement and then follow with a question. Make the impact, leave the reader with a question back to it. It's two sentences, paragraph break.
Those are the best essays.
He practiced this technique many times in this article. But is this the format of best essays [of the Internet]?